Approach of Coordinated Control Method for Over-Actuated Vehicle Platoon based on Reference Vector Field

Collaborative vehicle platoon control with full drive-by-wire vehicles with four-wheel independent driving and steering (FWIDSV) has attracted broader research interests. However, the problem of cooperative vehicle platoon control in two-dimensional driving scenes remains to be solved. This paper proposes a coupling control method for path tracking and spacing-maintaining based on the reference vector field (RVF). An integrated hierarchical control structure, including the following control layer, tire force allocator layer, and an actuator controlling layer for FWIDSV is presented. Inside, the next control layer was designed according to the spacing control strategy and RVF within the limitation of the friction circle. For verifying the effectiveness of this control method, sufficient conditions for error convergence are analyzed when considering the influence of the critical parameters on the particle dynamics model. The tire force allocator layer is designed based on linear quadratic programming (LQP), which is used to distribute the total forces and yaw moment. The sliding mode control (SMC) is employed to track the desired tire forces in the actuator controlling layer. The proposed control methods are validated through simulation in intelligent cruise control (ICC) and platoon merging scenarios. The results demonstrate an effective FWIDSV platoon control approach that is based on the RVF in the 2-D driving scenes.